January Sales : GW2

In all the time I've played GW2, three and a half years, many thousands of hours, I've hardly spent anything. As form of entertainment it has to be about the cheapest imaginable, short of cloud-watching.

Odd pricing history.
Why no gem total against the two bank slots?
They certainly weren't freebies like the rest of
the nonsense down the bottom there.

Let's see, I bought the original game and then a second copy for a second account, both at full price. Much later I bought a third copy when it was on sale at 75% off to give me three accounts in total.

For more than two years I ran the first two as equals but eventually the game's slippage from character to account-based play pushed me into choosing one as a primary and focusing on that. Currently I play the first and third account actively with the second coming out only to do dailies.

The reason for keeping the third active is that it has no characters at level 80 and I plan on keeping it that way. It means I get a different selection of dailies, which I find both refreshing and entertaining. Also it's on a different server which means I get to see WvW in a very different context from the #1 NA experience currently available on Yaks Bend.

As a result of this consolidation and stratification I have only bought one copy of Heart of Thorns. I imagined it would be the only copy I ever bought but because I enjoyed the expansion so much more than I expected there is an outside chance I might one day buy a second copy for the dormant account.

I'm keeping that as a fallback option in case it takes another three years before the next expansion and we get another major content drought. I am already thinking, very much to my own surprise, that I'd quite like to start HoT again from scratch. Opening all the maps and finding all the Masteries and Hero Points was really good fun and I'm a little sorry it's almost over.

However much you spend you're never going to look better than when you were level ten.

Other than buying those four "boxes" in getting on for four years, though, I've spent nothing. Not, at least, in real money. I've made a number of purchases through the Gem Store over the years but every one has been funded by exchanging gold earned in-game for Gems through the Black Lion Trading Post.

I'm aware that, somehow, theoretically, that means someone, somewhere paid ANet some real money but it wasn't me. It's not because I'm averse in any way to spending money on my hobby, either. For the entire time I've played GW2 I've also maintained an All Access account with SOE/DBG, for which I pay $14.99 a month.

Even though I've had All Access since it was Station Pass I haven't even bothered to take the annual option to save money. Paying a sub never makes me feel I need to log in to get my money's worth. I just think of it as membership dues to a club.  If ANet required a subscription to play GW2 I'd have been paying it without hesitation these last three years - although probably not on three accounts.

And here are just a few of my skins that I'll probably never use...

The problem, when it comes to GW2 separating me from my money, is simple. There's almost never anything added to the Store that I want. I am not very much interested in changing the look of my characters, for example. I like to level them up in whatever they happen to find along the way and then, when they hit 80, choose a look that will be theirs forever. I get confused if I log in and my characters don't look the way I expect them to look.

Sounds tempting...

What's more, I like either quasi-realistic and/or understated appearances. I like armor that looks wearable, weapons that look practical and clothes that look ordinary, a look that's available in game for next to nothing. There are exceptions and I'm not averse to a bit of dressing up but I'm certainly not interested enough to pay for it, or indeed make any substantial in-game effort to acquire it either.

Whoaaaaa, Nelly!

I'm fond of vanity pets in MMOs but GW2's minis are simply too small to be really desirable. Also there's a huge selection available for a few gold each on the Trading Post. Even most of the practical options, things like the unbreakable harvesting tools or the harvestable nodes for your personal instance, seem completely pointless to me.

Then there's the pricing structure. There are things I might buy - I like some of the toys - but they are just too expensive. In real money terms I am not going to pay £5 so one of my characters can run around with a kite. Especially not when the process of accessing and using the kite is so awkward and fiddly. If I could hot-key it for instant access then maybe.

Other potentially interesting acquisitions are locked behind the RNG of the game's lockboxes, Black Lion Chests. Once again, I actually don't get all hot under the collar over the concept - I quite like a Lucky Bag - but the pricing, at around £1 a key, is insane.

Best. Bargain. Ever.

Over the years mostly the only objects I have bought have been toys, when they go on sale - the Magic Carpet remains one of my favorite things in the game - or when they are very, very cheap - like the Ear Muffs that appeared this Wintersday for the irresistible price of 25 Gems. I bought those for every account and a pair for Mrs Bhagpuss as a gift. I'm nothing if not generous!

Is it me or is there a Julius Caesar vibe going on here?

Apart from that I have paid only for services and upgrades, namely Bank and Character Slots. I'd love to buy Bag Slots too but again they are ridiculously overpriced and they never seem go on sale except in an annoying pack with some boosters I don't want.

Part of the original thinking in buying a second account was that it was much, much cheaper than adding storage and characters to a single account, which remained the case for a couple of years. Now, though, it makes more sense just to add capacity to my focus account.

There's currently a New Year's Sale going on. I almost missed it. I just happened to notice a news item on Dulfy's site. There was no in-game notification that I saw and of course all my GW2 accounts are attached to unique email addresses made for them that I never look at so any promotional material misses me entirely.

Luckily I caught the sale in time to buy extra Bank Slots for the focus and junior accounts. I also added a tenth character slot to the main account even though I have no plans on making a new character and indeed have both a Mesmer and a Revenant leveling up already.

Let's go fly a kite. Oh, wait, not at that price.

Jeromai and Liore have been talking about de-cluttering and hoarding, virtual and real. As I get older and ever more aware that there are books I simply won't ever have time to re-read and movies I have already watched for the final time I find myself becoming more sympathetic than once I was to the concept of letting physical objects go. I can't see any reason not to keep adding more imaginary storage space hold more imaginary things in a video game, though.

ANet don't agree. The storage isn't imaginary to them, after all, it's an overhead. At eleven Bank Slots I am now one short of the most I'm allowed on the main account. Lucky I have two more accounts then, isn't it?

And, well, I guess, if pushed, I can see one downside. I do spend a very, very large amount of time both organizing my storage in each MMO I play and trying to find things I've stashed. As a rule that's considered core gameplay where I'm coming from - check the title of this blog - but even I have my limits as to how much bag-sorting I can find actively entertaining and my recent eight-hour stints have pushed at the boundaries a little.

For now, though, I'm very happy with my bargains. It's nice to be able to find something in the Gem Store at last that I'm excited to buy. And I have to do something with all that gold.

Taxi To The Financial Zone : WildStar

When I chose the name for this blog I had some quasi-situationist fancy that I'd write about nothing but bags, boxes and banks (which would have been a pretty good alternative blog title, come to think of it). Luckily I realized that, like most situationist pranks, it was an idea better imagined than executed . Still, I am fascinated by inventory space in games and I do consider inventory management to be content in and of itself.

Prior to playing WildStar I think the game I played, at least for more than a session or two,  that had the most restrictive inventory was Allods. Back in beta I seem to remember working with just one bag that held about twenty items, for about fifteen levels. Maybe it was fewer. Items, that is, not levels.

Allods, however, was a free-to-play title from the start and selling inventory space for real money is a commonplace and entirely legitimate way for F2P operators to earn a living and keep the servers running. It's hardly surprising space was at a premium. WildStar, at least for a little while longer, is a subscription game. I'm scratching my head trying to think of another subscription MMO that both starts you off with so little bag space and appears to be set on keeping it that way.

The basic starter backpack has sixteen slots. You also get a Tradeskill Bag, into which all your crafting mats go automatically. Not sure how voluminous that is - I haven't found much to go in it yet.  Then there's a separate inventory for quest items. Maybe sixteen slots doesn't sound that bad....


As a rule it takes an appreciable while in most MMOs before bag space becomes an issue. Often there's an extra small bag or two early on as a quest reward. Sometimes monsters drop them. They tend to be one of the earliest items you can craft. And even so I can usually get through a few play sessions before having to think about the options. So far I've seen nothing like that at all in WildStar. I guess that could be because I skipped the entire starting zone.

Last night, at level seven, I didn't only run out of bag space, I ran out of things I was willing to sell or destroy to make space to pick up more things to sell or destroy, which was what I'd been doing for the two levels before that. The only vendor I could find willing to sell me a bag was offering one that added two spaces. Two spaces! That's not a bag. That's barely a purse.

I told her to keep her measly 2-slotter and flounced off in a huff. Didn't actually occur to me that perhaps I could have bought several of the things and expanded my bag by six or eight slots. Which it turns out you can. Bit late now.

I wanted to keep all the armor and weapons I'd outgrown because I don't yet understand (read: haven't bothered to find out) how the appearance/cosmetic system works. What with those and things I couldn't throw away because I didn't quite grok what they were for yet I found myself in a bit of a quandary.

The obvious thing to do would be to bank everything but that meant finding a bank and the guards at Woodhaven didn't seem to know of one. (Turns out banks are accessible only in capital cities for some stupid 2004-era rose-tinted nostalgia/deeply immersive, hardcore, roleplay-friendly reason). Fortunately, even though I didn't know that at the time, I remembered seeing a sign for financial services when I was wandering around Thayd the day before, so I got a taxi (at some considerable expense) and went back there.

Once I'd done that and knocked off a couple of challenges (one of which gave me a purple
quality house item, which I'm sure will look just dandy, when I have a house) I just about had time to get a taxi back to Woodhaven before it was time to go to bed.

I'm increasingly aware that there's one whole heck of a lot that I don't understand about WildStar and by that I mean the real basics - like how the inventory, appearance and crafting systems work, for example. It seems a bit pointless to dig into it now, though, when quite probably a lot's going to change when the F2P conversion arrives.

Maybe I should just go play on the F2P beta server and learn the new ropes instead. Hmm. That's an idea...

There's Bags Of Room In Here ! : GW2, EQ2

Two small news items caught my attention this week. Guild Wars 2 is having a sale on bag and bank slots until 26th February, the very day EQ2 patches in bag sorting.

When I decided to start a blog a couple of years or so back, I already had the name and a clear idea what I intended to blog about. I was going to write about one of my very favorite aspects of MMOs, one of the main activities that drew me into the genre in the first place and kept me hooked all these years: inventory management.

My first post here was emblematic of what I intended. I even called it "My Bag". A handful more posts on the topic followed but the theme soon sank out of sight under the tsunami of opinion, reportage, whimsy and general MMO noodling with which anyone who visits here now and again will be all too familiar.

Despite my inability to stay on message, however, I'm still extremely interested in inventory management. There's little I like better on a Sunday morning than a long, leisurely browse through my imaginary backpacks, picking up beautifully-drawn icons of logs of wood and chunks of ore, sorting medallions, sigils and runes into tidy stacks, poring through piles of weapons and armor deciding what to keep, what to sell and what to hand on.

When it comes to inventory, GW2 and EQ2 provide an instructive contrast in approach, both from a player's and a developers point of view. Both games operate on a form of free-to-play, generating at least some of their income stream through cash shops. In the classic F2P model, inventory space has tended to be used as a key driver of income.

Back when I was playing, I remember tiny bags and very limited storage being baked in to both Allods and Runes of Magic, generating intentional frustration which the cash shop stood ready to relieve at the flick of a credit card. EQ2, on the other hand, converted from a subscription model that offered what is probably the most profligately generous of all MMO inventory systems.

Like Everquest before it, EQ2 sends you out into the world with more storage at level 1 than many MMOs allow you when fully extended, expanded and kitted out at level cap. Even under the very first, most restrictive version of the EQ2 F2P template, a Bronze starter potentially had a couple of hundred inventory slots.

The irony is that it was under Allods extremely restrictive regime that I was able to hone and refine my own inventory management skills. Faced with the choice of keeping everything I owned in what would barely pass for a Halfling's waistcoat pocket in Norrath or paying real money for really not that much more, I opted for the former and learned to sort, sell and send smart.

Before that, spoiled by the vast vaultage of the  Norrathian banking system and the cavernous backpacks and boxes knocked out for a pittance by Norrathian crafters, I'd been in the habit of keeping everything. If I ever did run out of space I'd just create another character and presto, another few hundred empty slots! Suddenly, thanks to the developers of Allods and other penny-pinching, money-grubbing game-makers with their selfish desire to earn a living, feed their families and keep a roof over their heads, I learned if not to love then at least to accept the tiny bag.

Moreover, it was in Allods that I also overcame my irrational fear of automated sorts. Let's not go overboard here - I still don't like systems that shake up my bags and leave everything tidier in a microsecond than I could get it in a month of Sundays. Those invisible sorting elves are having all my fun and making me look bad while they're having it. But sometimes you just need stuff sorted and fun has to take a back seat.

The upshot is that I've played GW2 for six months without feeling the need to buy any bag space whatsoever. I've thought about it a few times. My mouse pointer has even hovered over the padlock on that second bank vault. In the end, though, there are two things stopping me clicking through and spending real money: I have enough space to get by without feeling frustrated and the cost of adding more is too steep.

Even at 20% off, each new bank vault costs around £5 and each additional bag slot around £3. Too much. Quite a lot too much. Of course, I could convert in-game Gold to Gems and pay that way, but still, gold is hard to come by and I just don't need the extra space that badly. Compare that to EQ2 where even though I don't really need more bag space either, SOE's frequent SC sales sometimes make it so so cheap to add extra storage to my Silver accounts that I'd be crazy not to take them up on it.

It seems to me that GW2 could have handled the sale of inventory space better, both in and out of the cash shop. Bags in-game are extortionately expensive. All bar the basic ones require various Runes of Holding sold by NPCs at prices ranging from four silver to ten gold. This establishes an irreducible base price for each type of bag or box and throws up a price ceiling that most players won't want to push through.

As the game began and money was tight, few would have wanted to go above the 12-slot bags and even now I would balk at paying two gold pieces for an 18-slotter, even making it at cost for myself. In fact, almost all my many characters manage just fine with ten-slot bags even at level 80. Four of those plus the 20-slot starter backpack is sufficient and the odd bonus along the way, like the 20-slot Ancient Karka Shell Box from the November event certainly helps.

With bags being sold at a high premium both inside and outside of the game, I feel ArenaNet have efficiently and successfully trained me to be satisfied, indeed happy, with limited storage options. I'm not complaining - it works for me. I'm just not sure it's for the best for the game. As a player it means I don't even bother to make bags for myself, probably the first time that's ever happened, and as a customer the single payment I made last September, when I bought a second account, may well be the only time I give them money this side of an expansion.

That second account turned out to be an excellent decision, by the way. It's served me extremely well ever since, providing me with all the character slots and storage space I'm ever likely to need, along with the invaluable option of mailing stuff to myself, something you can't do on a single account and which is incredibly convenient.

What with all this and the very generous and easy to get Guild Bank and its extensions, somewhat to my surprise I find myself looking forward more to EQ2's new bag sorting options than to the prospect of a fire sale on storage in Tyria. Indeed, if I was going to take advantage of any of ANet's current promotions, it would more likely be the 30% off the game itself. 

I don't really need a third account though. Do I?

Just One More Thing...

Sunday Morning. By long tradition a time to sort through packs and bags and vaults. To wake sleepy half-elves and dozing dwarves and send them grumbling down to the mailbox or the bank. Sometimes morning runs into afternoon. Sometimes it lasts all day.

Alright, I'll come clean. Sometimes it lasts all week. An inordinate amount of my gameplay in most MMOs seems to consist of moving items from one virtual storage area to another. There's a reason this blog is called "Inventory Full".

Am I complaining? Hardly! It's one of the things I enjoy the most. It's satisfying in the same way tidying a cluttered room is satisfying, only without the dust and the endless bending over. Nothing better than sitting back after a couple of hours hard clicking to see three empty bags looking back at you. Another 120 slots to fill with Large Meaty Bones and Droag Egg Fragments.

Sunday Morning at the Bank. With Bear.

Available storage space has a big influence on how loyal I am to an MMO. A game that allows me to hoard vast quantities of junk that I'll probably never find a use for has a significantly better chance of seeing me log in regularly and keep on logging in for years than one that doesn't. I may lose interest in progressing the characters, I may never have been interested in the story, but I will always need to visit my stuff.

Spot the odd one out

 Contrarily, MMOs that are extremely stingy with storage space sort of work for me too. It's liberating to know that I can't just pick up everything that falls out of a goblin or hang onto all my no-stats starter gear in case I ever get the urge to stroll around town dressed as a dirt-poor farm-boy. Having just the one bag and a measly bank vault means I spend a lot more time actually doing the things the designers probably meant me to do, like quests and stuff. I've never once felt tempted to spend real money to get more space, though, so that part of the design doesn't seem to be working.

I rarely build up any kind of long-term connection with MMOs where space is a commodity. I find I think of myself as a wandering ronin. Oh alright then, The Littlest Hobo. I'm free to come and go as I please, and after a while I don't please all that often and finally not at all.

So, masses of storage space good, almost no storage space also good, if not for long. It's in the middle that I run into problems. I moaned about Lord of the Rings Online a while back. At the time I was complaining more about how tiny everything was rather than how much of it I had but the sheer quantity of junk that I have squashed into a middling amount of storage space does present a real barrier to entry when it comes to dropping back in.

No I am not a "beardy hobbit"

What I lack in height...

The recently-announced and somewhat controversial Premium Wallet that I read about over at KTR  isn't going to help me all that much. I don't have all that many extraneous currency items clogging up my packs and even if I did I surely wouldn't be paying any ten dollars for aggregation rights. Mostly what I have is crafting raws. And food. And potions. Something else that Zubon mentions could just make a difference to my LotRO quality of life, though, and that's the Shared Bank. I might finally have found a use for the 1045 Turbine Points I have somehow accumulated. Well, 995 of them at least.

Not quite sure what brought all that on. None of this was what I intended to write about when I started at the top of the page. That's Sunday morning for you.